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Theme: Drinking & Women

(29 entries)

October 14, 2006

London, actually

Jack is on vacation. In his absence, we present posts from Jane, who is also on vacation — from reality.

So I had rented this house on Fire Island with my buddies anticipating the demise of my New York City self in advance of moving to London for sabbatical. Away from Jack, away from the lesbians, away from the shitty indifference that’s so typical of my adopted home. So.

Now I’m in London (an instantaneous switching of the scene due to poor blogging skills). I moved here to get away from all of the bullshit. Here there’s loads of bullshit. It just has very little to do with my world so I don’t pay much attention to it. (Comparative analysis can come later.)

Music for chameleons

Jack is on vacation. In his absence, we present posts from Jane, who is also on vacation.

Another day in the luscious and infernal Cherry Grove. It just keeps going. I suppose I should tell more anecdotes in order to make my hijack worthwhile. Something worth reading. (Apologies for not performing better under pressure!)

The only thing exciting that’s happened recently is that I got stung, bit, irritated by something. Swimming in the sea, kicking my girlhood siren fantasy — or desperately scrapping for a lobster-boy pass, as Rob calls her funny orange turbo-tailed nerfball that we pat about in the surf — it’s impossible to isolate the incident. Somehow I wound up with a Farrah-Fawcett-Burning-Bed-style bruise/laceration on my trunk. At first I thought it was just the result of a mid-afternoon wrestling match between me, Rob, and Cassandra (the fabulous one of the bunch) that shook the rafters of Tee-Pee House. A match that resulted in bruises upon all and the death of my sunglasses for which I performed an instant Irish wake that garnered the applause of all.

Sea, sex, and sun: Pick two

Jack is on vacation. In his absence, we present posts from Jane, who is also on vacation.

Dear Jack,

Greetings from Fire Island. I wish you were here. I realized that I’m gay and I want you to tell the world that I’m not coming back.

Ever yours,
Jane

Just kidding! Sort of. I’m on Fire Island. Cherry Grove to be specific. Having a gay old sopping-drunk blast with my dyke friends. And, no, I’m not sure that I want to come back. What a strange and wonderful place this is! It reminds me a lot of when I lost my mind back in Nice a few years ago.

I’m just now truly settling in after ten days or so of “vacation.” It has to better here than wherever you are, for sure. As Serge Gainesbourg said, “Sea, sex, and sun.” And even if I’m not the one having sex, it’s still fun. I’ve seen more live action male frontal nudity in these ten or so days than ever before in my 26 years. My friends dismissively say this is the trashy part of queer Fire Island, not surprising given the condition of our rickety matchstick rented abode known as Tee-Pee House. But I think it’s great the house wobbles every time I heave out an asthmatic cough, though fortunately everyone is too drunk to notice.

A View from the Bitch

Jack is on vacation. In his absence, we present posts from Jane, who is also on vacation.

Yeah, America is ugly, grey and concrete. Americans are fat, lazy and lonely. Big raging fucking whoop. Boo-hoo, I’m rich, over-qualified and unmotivated. Quel dommage! I think it’s about time we caught up with the rest of the world’s despair.

To qualify, the rest of the post-colonial-Western-European-world-except-a-shadow-of-it-since-we-haven’t-had-to-deal-with-any-REAL-economic-crisis-or-uprising-apart-from-the-Great-Depression-when-the labor-movement-had-legs-to-stand-on-that-were-soon-clipped-etc. I’m sick of this substance-less pseudo-existentialist dilemma that my criminally-bored generation (myself included) suffers from. And I’m FUCKING sick of hyphenating!

Yes, you’re right. This isn’t Jack. I’ve hijacked his blog. And in the interest of making good with my opportunity to humiliate him, I will begin with alliteration. Who hijacks the blog of a hapless hack? The homely hunfortunate victim of his h-musings. How fair is it to be written? To have your heart distilled into a couple of clever (or not so) lines? I’m a complex woman. I love people. I’m not all dreams and booze and maudlin nonsense! But now I’ll never convince you. I’m just a chimerical series of typed characters. In fact, you fans of Trouble Sells may not even remember me. I briefly appeared in this blog a couple of years ago. Though I breathe still. And also SEE our Protagonist Jack somewhat regularly. He’s right. Things indeed have been strange since OUR bar closed one year, seven months, and eleven days ago. That bar was a grounding device. In spite of whatever adversity I faced, I could always count on getting drunk among those familiar souls who were drunker than me (which says a lot, as you would know if you’re familiar with this blog). Can we tell Jack to shut up for once? Can we tell him to shut up about his stupid alienation and juvenile fantasies? Can we tell him to buy me drink so that I don’t stop typing?

Two girls drinking

Amanda smirked and climbed off of me slowly. She began to whistle, which I didn’t remember she could do. She wandered around the room for a few seconds, straightening pillows. All while the baby cried. Then she disappeared into the bedroom, leaving the door open as it scratched on the carpet. I heard her make baby conversation and then the screaming turned off like a switch. “That’s a good girl,” Amanda drawled at a distance. “Yes, you are, a good thirsty girl.”

I put my head back and stared at her cracking Racine ceiling. I folded my hands on my chest and shut my eyes. “Everything all right in there?” I called out after a while.

After a while she called back, “Chugging along. Will you bring me a beer?”

Menacing reunion

The room was long and dark, like the three-day vacation ahead of me. I approached the bar cautiously and with respect. I didn’t want to blow this. I needed them more than they needed me. There weren’t many people in the bar. I was on the lookout for someone in attire featuring heroic truck imagery. But if he was there, he was undercover. The bartender and I converged at the center of the bar. He was about to ask me what I wanted to buy from him. “I like that truck out front,” I said to him, maybe too desperately.

Meeting cute

After Erica led me into her apartment, I took her coat and left her to mix the drinks while I snooped around the place. I had never been invited back to the apartment she shared with Kerry before, and certainly not by Kerry. I left our coats on a chair and stood in the doorway of Kerry’s room, noting the too-big bed but not touching it: I’d leave that for when I saw her next. Sure, she might have had to leave town suddenly, but she’d be back, and I could resume my lifelong process of learning how to seduce her.

Blame Javier

I slept in late on Friday because I had nothing else to do. That’s more or less my explanation for everything. I called my ardent supporters at 26 Street Color Labs to tell them I’d be in Monday to get the chromes I should have gotten immediately. But it was only for a job. I had better things to worry about, like my wounded soul [sic].

Kerry had canceled our date, and it was a blow. It was a date that never should have been conceived of to begin with, and when it had been, it had given me hope. I thought maybe I had underrated Kerry, myself, and the race of man. Then she had canceled, and I realized that in fact, once again, I was right about everything. I was not going to get a piece of that.

Date night, but not for us

As Thursday rolled around, I had spent several days congratulating myself for scheduling The Date That Should Not Have Been, due to occur in just two more days. I went out to my day of toil in the vineyards of overproduction, meeting up with the same agency types who had been recently feeding and clothing me, though not personally, but with money. I showed up fed on Corn Flakes (a former client) and clothed in Levi’s (I am Orthodox in my jeans choice). Just steps into the space, the account executive immediately sidelined me and said, “Can’t you look professional?”

She hate me, she hate me not

Stepping backwards in the narrative for a moment, after Kerry and I parted ways on Thanksgiving in the Wilds of Park Avenue, I anticipated the beginning of a radio silence between us, the length of which would be unknown. I had abandoned writing it all up for Paper magazine before the end of the cab ride home. I knew Kerry’s cab would be going in the same direction until it angled over some bridge or other. It made me feel like a low-down heel. I am bad at hitting on the girls I actually like. My only consolation is that there are so few of them.

I'm Your Recent Future Positions

As you know, I operate in a kind of time lag. I can’t comment on things as they happen. Sometimes it takes me a few days, sometimes a few years, but I guarantee that everything I report is a genuine thought from my head. This is called “reflection” and “analysis” and it is what I do to drive the girls wild. Today, like Entertainment Weekly, I’d like to uncork a few once-timely thoughts on music.

In fall 2001, the hubbub in the music world was over the new records of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, or at least it should have been. Now that Mr. Cohen has come out with an even newer recording, something about a girl named Jennifer or Michelle, it’s time to discuss the once-new Cohen album, entitled “Who I’ve Been Sleeping With Lately” (bowdlerized for the American market as “Ten New Songs”), which in due course I’ll compare unfavorably with Dylan’s “Love and Theft”.

Snowbound on Park Avenue

One bubbly wifey in a fuzzy Burberry pullover kept watching me amusedly over her platinum rings. “You must be a cigar,” I told her in confidence, “because you are smokin’.”

“Do you like cigars?” broke in her chipper apparent husband. “I brought some great ones from our last trip to Paris. We’ll smoke them after dinner.” He patted my arm with fraternal promise. It was like wife-swapping. I was swapping him back his wife for a stogie. I want you to know that I can’t be bribed. I decided to hit on his wife more when he wasn’t sitting next to me.

We all drank our way through some uptown version of turkey and stuffing, which seemed to mostly be shellfish, and then repaired to the drawing room once again for the continued drawing-out of Kerry’s life of the party. Before the men could fully swarm her, I crouched down by her armchair and hissed, “What are you doing.”

What's White Now

That is not the name of this article, but rather the name of the one I’ve been researching for the year-end double issue of Paper magazine. Contemporary whiteness is often hard to define, especially as Lenny Kravitz records and Hong Kong action movies seem to be such a stable foundation for it. However, my editors do not want excuses, but results, so I have to go to a lot of cocktail parties uptown. I feel I can talk about these issues here rather than in the magazine, because I have decided not to write the article. Mostly because I don’t like to do work.

For research purposes, my editor called in some favors and got me invited to a Thanksgiving dinner at the home of some successful professionals on the Upper East Side. It was to be a gold mine of whiteness, and I had my notebook ready. The host was the youngest partner at his bank, and the hostess was a supermodel who had just barely retired. They were wealthy, but not as wealthy as their guests, except me. Although I am ethnically white, I was there to represent the non-white perspective, by comparison.

I phoned up Kerry because I know she admires rich white people. I asked if she would be my date. I needed cover.

The most years of our lives

During that ended era, the 1990s, there was an elongated and still unpaid-for period in which I sat in bars with a guy I knew, as contrasted with my modern policy, in which I do that alone or with girls. It was that inevitable transition from college to the stunned denial of lack of college, during which you still hang out with frat brothers, and we tried to keep the inebriation at its usual award-winning level. (As I believe I’ve alluded to before, our fraternity was written up in both New York Magazine and the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times for retro-progressive “drunkenness” well in advance of the national return of “cocktail culture”. I’m most proud of having been listed along with Tara Reid, Robert Downey, Jr., and a whole slew of British TV presenters in miniskirts as “Who’s Drunk in the ’90s”. My mother has the clipping, as do theirs.)

We didn’t have jobs. We would sit in bars wearing black, drinking middle-shelf whiskey, and pretending to smoke Nat Sherman’s. I don’t really know how we afforded to do that, and I think the secret is we didn’t, or at least I didn’t. He was the wealthy one; I was the witty, sexy, and depressed one. He was depressed as well, of course, and rich and well-connected. In fact, our good qualities could have been added together to make the perfect man, but, alternately, our depression could have been added up to make the perfect suicide. We sat around bars, drinking of their liquors, complaining to each other about how we were depressed, and then we’d look for girls sort of half-heartedly, because, of course, women are soul-stealing bitches, etc., plus we couldn’t ask them what classes they were taking and if they knew Marge Pengel because hadn’t we seen them over at Marge’s party?

You've got a friend

As loyal readers know, lately I’ve only been posting to the “Damned Human Race” category on this site — which is to say discussing politics. As you also know, political blog postings are the last refuge of scoundrels, but as you also also know, I am one of those. On another hand, what are we to make of those with a “Drinking & Women” category?

I wanted to report here on some twentieth-century memories of my “best friend” (by default) Meg, because lately she’s been bugging me a lot and I thought this might put her in her place. I will let you know if it works.

Kisses for my president

While we wait to see if Howard Dean can win Wisconsin, the Republicans made their bid for the future this week in New York. As a member of the loyal opposition, I held my own convention in my apartment with a Texas-sized bottle of vodka and a rental of Passionate Conservatives Volume 6: Meatpacking Misfits. I was sort of bummed about the convention, because they asked Zell Miller to speak and not me, and we are both Democrats, plus I don’t have some hick accent. Anyway, his speech was pretty good, and I basically agreed with it if you took out all the stuff about the Democrats. Really, I think the DNC is playing a dangerous game allowing him to pretend to cozy up to the enemy while really acting as a Trojan Horse to destroy them from within. It may well end up backfiring.

Sometimes I'm happy, sometimes I'm blue

I took the blue hand of the blue girl, after she had collected her box and basket, and led her through the tunnel to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. She drew close to me, and as we moved we did not speak. I brought her out into the land of air, onto Eighth Avenue, and we walked toward the Hudson, a river.

AND NOWthe answer to the age-old question:WHAT’S IT LIKE TO FUCK A BLUE PERSON?

An angel descends, or, at least, stoops

The problem with me is that I am a man, rather than a man and a woman somehow separated by divine forces, ever eager to rejoin and form one perfect being. That’s what everybody else at the bar is doing. But when the jock-half of humanity remerges with the cheerleader-half, or the he-dorks find the she-dorks, everything makes sense. But where the heck is Ms. Asshole?

I'm a sentimentalist

I’m a sentimentalist and there’s nothing sadder than a drunk girl with an empty glass. Especially around the holidays. I ran into Our Friend Jane recently, who wasted no time in asking me to buy her a drink — a gift, in the spirit of the season — to replace all those she’d made disappear. I gestured appropriately to the barman and seated myself next to dreamy Janey, wondering what she wanted to get off her chest this time, and if it’d be dirty.

I looked around our little slice of heaven, the local bar. I nodded to my compatriots. It attracts a crowd — if a handful of deadbeats can be called a crowd — with not much in common except loneliness and drunkenness, the holiest of human attributes. Unlike most New York bars, there is a wide ethnic range. It’s sort of like the U.N., but without all the diplomacy. It is a Bar That Looks Like America, especially because it’s going to shit.

The task, heroic; the hero, me

So I go to a party some white girl is throwing for herself. Looking around at the celebrants, I think Leonard Jeffries cannot be all wrong. She asks me, “Have you met anyone interesting?” I say, “You mean ever? I know you don’t mean tonight.”

But because the proper study of mankind is heartless bitches, I wade into this Whitey Biennial in search of god, love, and guns, just like my blogless gonzo forebears.

Dealbreakers

You might remember the film Dealbreakers from a few seasons back, a romantic comedy in which Jennifer Love Hewitt plays a young woman who seems to have found her true love, until her breast reduction surgery proves too much for their relationship to bear.

Multi-level marketing of me

Life in the bar is a series of compromises and reconfigurations. One must be fleet of foot or risk being thrown off the logroll. The general tactic is, go to talk to the bartender, not girls. Then start trading up. If, at any time, the most fascinating woman in the room is carted away in an ambulance, pick a new belle of the ball and work from there. Move laterally if you have to, but don’t move backward.

It’s about momentum. Use the bonhomie generated in one conversation to fuel your entry into the next. It isn’t as systematic as I’m making it sound. It’s organic, things ebb and flow, but you do need to be on the lookout for when Someone Better comes in. It’s sort of like An American Tragedy in that respect.

My generation

Or, maybe, just my weekend. We were on a rigorous schedule. If the hours had been flip-flopped, and “drinking, crying, and vomiting,” had been replaced with “riding, swimming, and singing campfire songs,” it would have been just like the girl scouts.

You'll find it in Balzac

Question: does the modern approach to homosexuality derive from Rex Harrison’s performance in My Fair Lady? Further question: does the trope of “take off your glasses and let your hair down and you’re pretty” spring from Marian the Librarian in The Music Man? Very possibly. I’ve always been a believer in living by the classics. Well, I’ve told you about my recent run-in with Teresa, noted barfly and pretty girl with bun and glasses, but, dear diary, it gets worse.

I show up at The Bar especially late and there she is, pool cue in one hand, whiskey in the other. She’s a neighborhood girl, parents are Puerto Rican but she speaks fluently in both their language and mine, no wrong accent either way. Thin, with a big head, like on TV. Like Shirley Jones in dark curls, her mouth hangs a little bit open all the time. I sit down. She’s telling her story, to no one in particular: “Oh, I can’t go back to my apartment tonight. They’re painting it. I have to sleep in my car.”

The enemy you know

As I hope to establish over the course of this project, I like drunk women. I do not like them in the way that frat persons like them, with some hope that they will become unconscious. Frankly, unconsciousness bores me. If I wanted to hang out with beings that lacked sentience, I would get a cat. No, I like them because, somewhere in my childhood of reading a lot of Tennessee Williams and watching Days of Wine and Roses over and over, I got the idea that alcoholism, like TB, is romantic.

I'm at the bar. In itself, normal.

The drinking has already started. I like to let things settle down before I show up. I don’t do the “after work” pass, I do “after midnight.” It’s a self-selected crowd: I don’t like to think of them as, necessarily, “the unemployed,” or “alcoholics,” or try to explain how they are able to stay out so late. I just admire their sense of purpose. I wish I knew what I wanted out of life half as much as the girl drinking whiskey while her boyfriend enjoys a glass of red wine. What a beautiful alternate cliché that would be.